Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  “I’ll read you this little bit, Martin. I mean, I really don’t think you can let this out of the office,” Owen said. “We’re sending these letters out all the time. We’re sending these letters out to writers. It’s embarrassing….” Owen’s consternation, his proprietary distress, was unnerving, and Martin realized that it would be easier to hear him out than to argue that Owen should take it up with Vic. Martin nodded at Owen to go ahead and read to him from a letter Vic had left for Helen LaPlante to type.

  “Okay, okay!” Owen was agitated, scanning the pages for what he wanted. “Here! Now what do you think? I could hardly believe it.” And he held up a page and began to read aloud:

  “This particular story is, in substance and also in style, reminiscent of much of the work of Alicia Smith, who is widely published and whom we’ve published often. While there is much about this piece that is fully realized and compelling, we think that it’s not quite strong enough to stand on its own as a piece of fiction. We do hope that you will think of us again and let us see more of your work.”

  Owen broke off for a moment to glance at Martin with a conspiratorial smirk. Martin thought briefly that Owen was mean, in the way that word had summed things up in childhood, but the thought was transient, and he listened patiently as Owen continued:

  “We hope you will understand that due to the dynamics of a small magazine such as ours, which only publishes six to eight stories annually, we try very hard to maintain diversity.”

  Owen let his arm drop to his side and shook his head slowly with an air of resigned bemusement, as though he had encountered an inevitable disappointment. Martin stood for several moments, waiting for him to explain, but Owen seemed to think the letter spoke for itself.

  “I don’t see the problem,” Martin said at last. “That’s sort of a form letter we send to any writer we think has some talent but who’s submitted a story that’s not very good. And the story’s usually not very good because it’s a pale imitation of a good writer who’s established a certain voice.” Martin was pleased at his own kindly patience, but Owen waved the letter over his desk in agitation.

  “Oh, Christ, Martin! ‘… the dynamics of a small magazine!’ What the fuck does that mean?” Owen was practically shouting at him. “It’s verbiage! It’s garbage! Is it General Dynamics? Is it fluid dynamics? Someone has to pay attention to what these words mean….”

  All at once Martin was overwhelmed with weariness, and he shook his head at Owen, lifting both hands in a gesture of surrender. Finally Owen wound down. “Owen. Listen! I don’t have the time…. This is hopeless. You just can’t work here. Don’t come here anymore. I’m sorry. I can’t do anything about this anymore.”

  Owen’s whole torso arched in surprise, and he slumped backward in his chair. He splayed his fingers at his temples and ran his hands back into his hair, flexing his chair with a sigh.

  “No, no,” Owen said mildly and with a look of deliberation. “I’m trying to learn to curb my perfectionism. I’m in Miracle Therapy, you know? I know better than this. I do. I know better than this. Anger is only emotional energy. I’m really trying. The point is to learn how to be open to goodwill instead of suspecting evil and unkindness.” Owen spoke matter-of-factly and with resignation. He gazed up at Martin composedly, but nothing in the world would have induced Martin to inquire about the nature of Miracle Therapy, and after a moment Owen continued. “I want you to understand that I mean every word I say when I tell you how sorry I am that I didn’t channel my anger. I’m only just learning to trust people and to love them. And I have real love for you, Martin. And for Vic. But I can’t expect either of you to fulfill my need for perfection.”

  Martin stood in the reception area and looked back at his own office, which had been a retreat for so many years. It had been a place where he could suspend melancholy and weed through submissions that might be dull or esoteric to other people, but that absorbed him entirely. He unwound Duchess’s leash, and she shambled over to him and stood patiently while he fumbled with the retracting hook. “I’m going out to the Hofstatters’. I won’t be back in the office today.” Martin was defeated, and he escaped.

  When Martin pulled into the long drive that led up through a meadow to the Hofstatters’ house, Duchess, terrified of car rides, was crowded against him, her head next to his above the steering wheel. The interior of the car was filled with the warm, tidal scent of dogs in hot weather. Catching sight of Vic in a bright blue shirt down by the pond, Martin pulled over and parked in the drive, flinging open both the front doors, so Duchess wouldn’t trample over his lap in her desperation to leave the car. She collapsed in relief on the verge of the drive while Martin let the car air out. He retrieved the manuscript from the trunk, where he had put it so the dog wouldn’t destroy it in her frantic scrabbling from the back to the front seat during the drive. Martin was relieved that Vic was sitting out by the pond, because if Ellen was working upstairs he didn’t want to disturb her.

  Ellen’s study was a renovated, low-ceilinged gabled attic at the top of the house. Years ago she had sketched out an arched window, vaguely Palladian, and taken the drawing to Milltown Patterns in Bradford to have one custom made for herself. Vic and Martin had installed it at the far end of the room under the peaked roof during weather exactly like this, and they had scarcely been able to be civil to each other by the end of the day. But Ellen had come upstairs and stood elated in the center of the room, pointing out to them how the light from the setting sun was broken into elongated squares across the old pine floorboards. “Mr. Aldenbrook at Milltown Patterns couldn’t understand why I wanted to go to all this trouble. He thought it would be a lot cheaper to order a regulation plate glass window, but look how the mullions divide the light! This is a wonderful room.”

  And Martin had felt much better. It was impossible not to be pleased to have fulfilled the eccentric precision of Ellen’s expectations. Dinah had arrived with sandwiches and beer and a jug of wine, and the four of them had had one of the most pleasant evenings of their long friendship, sitting on the floor in the near dark, eating sandwiches and drinking too much.

  But Ellen had told him just the other day that she was seeing windows like hers all over town now, in the most unremarkable, solely cosmetic, renovations. As a result she had literally turned her back on the window in her own study, rotating her desk so that instead of looking out at the wooded mountains, she now worked with the light falling over her shoulders. He understood that it was unbearable to Ellen to think that anything in her life was not rare and superior—in that it was her own original invention—but he was disappointed at her tactlessness in telling him of her disenchantment with something that, in its way, had partially been a gift from him.

  With Duchess close at his heels, Martin made his way along the slate path that meandered through a space of controlled woods; he had helped Vic hack away the impassable underbrush the summer after Ellen’s window. There was a fine stand of towering walnut trees and flowering wild honeysuckle bushes and then a slope of open meadow that Vic and Ellen had gently terraced down to the pond, where Vic sat at a white wrought-iron table under the willow trees.

  He put some papers aside when he saw Martin approaching, and Martin had the momentary sensation, as he came down the hill, that the vivid colors of Vic’s blue shirt and aged yellow straw gardening hat under the heated light, the barely wavering tendrils of the sweeping willows, and the quality of Vic’s stillness were permanent on the earth, were beyond the reality of the progression of time. Then Vic called a greeting, and the image in Martin’s head shattered into the separate fragments of the ongoing day.

  “I’ve got Brenner’s manuscript,” Martin said as he settled in a chair across from Vic. “I was thinking that we might want to devote an issue to it, but I wanted to talk to you first, and I decided to drive out. I was afraid it might be too early, though.” Martin turned to watch the dog in case she was seized with one of her occasional fits of exuberance and headed off for the
trails in the far woods. But Duchess merely nosed around the edge of the pond and flung herself down in a muddy spot along the bank.

  When Martin turned back, Vic was standing looking across the pond with an irritated expression. Martin thought that perhaps he had arrived too early. “At least one issue,” Vic said, clearly annoyed.

  “You think we should take that much of the book?” Martin’s voice was pleasant; he had no idea why Vic was so exasperated.

  “I think we should take the whole book. I attached a long memo when I gave the thing back to Owen. Netta brought him out to swim one afternoon, and I thought it would save me a trip into town. But he said you hadn’t seemed excited. That you thought Brenner’s agent sent it to us as a courtesy because we had published part of his last book when the magazines weren’t interested. I don’t know. This new one’s a strange book. Hard to excerpt, really. I’m not sure he could place it that easily.” Vic sat down again, squinting slightly into the distance. “But suppose we devoted all four issues to the entire book. It would get some publicity for the book. And for The Review. You can’t think his agent sent it as a courtesy! Give me a break! But if you think Brenner insisted because he feels beholden… I mean, if this has something to do with your idea of honor…” he said wryly, raising an eyebrow. “But, Christ, Martin, he can always turn down the offer.”

  Martin slouched down in his chair and let his head fall forward while he massaged the back of his neck with one hand, his eyes closed. He was remembering the memoless, slightly gritty, water-rumpled manuscript that Owen had left on his desk. Owen must have put it down on the floor of his car and piled his and Netta’s wet towels on top of it. “Ah, God,” Martin said, not loudly but with resignation. “Well, I fired Owen this morning.”

  Vic perked up. “You did? You fired him? What did he say?”

  “He said he has great love for you and me.”

  “So? You mean he’s not going to be fired?”

  “He avoided it, I think. And I can’t leave him fired, anyway. Penny will be back in four weeks, and if we fired him the whole town would hear about it. I feel sorry for him.”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  “Yeah,” Martin said, and continued massaging his neck, turning his head slowly from side to side to stretch the muscles. “But he’s a pathetic asshole. Maybe he won’t come in tomorrow,” he said. “And I really don’t know how to get rid of him if he does come back. I feel terrible for Larry and Judith.” Martin was filled with dread at the prospect of explaining the situation to Owen’s parents.

  “You know, at his best he’s real good at being charming in a sort of bumbling way,” Vic said. “That’s how he was when he came out to swim. He’s like a Doberman in a golden retriever’s body. Ellen thinks he might be manic depressive.”

  “Do you think so, too?” Martin slid down in his chair, stretching his legs in front of him and closing his eyes as he rested his head as comfortably as he could on the iron scrollwork. He was genuinely curious. He had always thought that Ellen was overly severe in the conclusions she drew, but there was something elusive about Owen. Maybe she had it right.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s drugs. Maybe it’s just Owen.”

  Martin was groggy and stunned from the heat and from lack of sleep, and he stayed just as he was in the white chair under the trailing willows, mulling over the facets of Owen’s personality. Martin let various suppositions drift across the surface of his mind, and he grew drowsier and more and more indifferent. He couldn’t even summon the energy to open his eyes when he heard Ellen join them.

  “I brought a pitcher of iced tea,” she said as she approached, “but the ice has already started to melt. I should have put it in the Thermos. It’s sweltering in my study. I thought I’d take a swim,” she added, and Martin looked up and smiled at her in greeting. Ellen smiled, too, and then turned away and walked down the gentle slope to the edge of the pond, where Duchess only opened her eyes to see what she was doing. Ellen stepped into the water ankle-deep. “The water’s not cool,” she called back to them, “but at least it’s wet.” She shrugged out of her terrycloth robe and tossed it behind her on the bank, wading nude into the deepening water, spreading it outward with her arms as it reached her waist, and launching herself gently forward so that her silvery-gray hair floated out behind her as she turned her face into the water and began to swim toward the far end where there were no shallows.

  Vic and Ellen always swam nude, and Martin never expected to be taken aback, although he was every time he joined them. Dinah thought their whole posture of casual nudity was an affectation, but Martin could never decide what to think. Years ago, when Ellen was slender and high-breasted, he had liked to believe that she wanted him to admire her. Now, however, that she had aged and thickened, he realized that there couldn’t be much of vanity in her nakedness. But he liked to watch her all the more, because there was something erotic about the pleasure she took from the contact of the water with her soft flesh, and she was a voluptuous, pretty woman still. He wondered, though, what she could be thinking. She was his closest woman friend, but did she imagine that he could sit there and not think of her sexually as she dawdled in the clear water, carrying on a perfectly normal conversation while slowly scissoring her legs and stirring the surface of the pond gently with her arms to hold herself in place and keep her head above water? Did it not occur to her or did it not matter?

  “What did you think of Philip Brenner’s book, Martin?” she asked him from where she lounged in the deep water at the far end of the pond.

  “That’s why I came out,” he said, loudly enough that she could hear him over the distance and the soft splashing of her movements. “Vic’s probably right that we should take the whole book if we can.”

  She nodded in approval and then let herself sink under the water, pushing off from the bottom of the pond so that as she broke the surface, with her head tilted back, the water swept her straggling hair flat against her skull into a smooth cap. Martin thought fleetingly that he was relieved that the Hofstatters hadn’t had children; Ellen wouldn’t have hesitated to nurse the baby wherever she might be, and he would have had to pretend that he was entirely comfortable watching a child suckle Ellen’s breast.

  “The water’s much cooler at this end where it’s been in the shade,” she called out to them as she turned to swim toward them, and Martin let his head fall back again so he wasn’t looking directly at her. No one had ever explained the etiquette of this situation to him. He let his eyes close again as he heard the steady splashing of her strong legs as she swam laps, and he fell into a half-sleep in the muggy air. Ellen was sitting with them, wrapped in her robe and briskly toweling her hair dry, when he came completely into consciousness again.

  “… and I feel deprived having toast without butter, or even worse, just imagine eating a tomato sandwich without mayonnaise,” she was saying to Vic. She bent forward and wrapped the towel turbanlike around her head, then settled back in her chair. “Martin, I baked bread this morning because I couldn’t sleep. But I can’t touch it, because I’ve really got to lose some of this weight.” She patted herself fondly on the thigh. “I’ll make the two of you some sandwiches for lunch, though. You’ll stay, won’t you? I’ll come down and sit with you. It’s so much cooler down here than in the house.”

  “Ellen’s dieting.” Vic ran his hand along the top of her leg where it emerged from beneath her robe, and she grinned, which was always a surprise. Her features were delicate and secret and feline, and her smile was usually composed, seemingly considered. When her whole face opened into a grin, it was so revealing of her pleasure that it was very much like being exposed to another aspect of her nakedness.

  “He can’t stand it,” she said to Martin, “because when we don’t have company I begrudge him every bite he takes.”

  “I just don’t see the point,” Vic said. “Being hungry makes you so miserable.”

  Ellen had lost interest in talking about food, however, an
d she looked at Martin with her face careful once more. “You think the Brenner book is good enough to devote four issues to?” she asked.

  “I’d love to do it, but I just got hold of the manuscript three days ago, and today is the deadline his agent gave us. I’m sure he’d rather sell it for real money.”

  Ellen frowned at him, and readjusted herself, crossing her legs and looking prim with disapproval, but Vic intervened.

  “I sent it back with Owen,” he said. “You remember when he and Netta were out here to swim? It took the long way round back to Martin.” Vic dropped his air of injury and laughed. “You know, Owen read the manuscript before he passed it on to me, and he could hardly wait to tell me that he thought it was needlessly obscure. He said it was time someone put Brenner out of his misery.” And Vic couldn’t contain his laughter, waving his hand to convey his helpless sense of the absurdity of what he was trying to say in long gasps of breath. “God,” he continued, “Owen was in a state of outrage. Just plain beside himself. He said someone should deliver Brenner to a taxidermist. Preserve him as a national monument!” Vic broke into laughter again, but Martin was overtaken by an unwelcome surge of pity for Owen, much like the misery he felt for some vocal but wrongheaded student in any seminar he taught. “He told me it was a piece of shit,” Vic said, still amused, but Ellen looked solemn.

  “I guess it gives him some sort of feeling of power to do that,” she said.

  “Well, Martin fired him this morning,” Vic told her.

  “Oh, I’m so glad, Martin!” Ellen said. “I’m uneasy around Owen. I don’t quite know why. I would have thought you would have noticed how he was with Netta, Vic. You and Martin are so protective of her, but you don’t seem to notice how Owen treats her. I’d almost call it abusive, but it’s not quite that extreme. He bullies her, though, in some way. He does it by being… oh… sort of sullen and moody. Sulky.” Vic shook his head to signify that he hadn’t noticed anything odd in Owen’s behavior toward Netta. “I’m so glad you let him go, Martin,” she said.